Archive for December, 2013

Giving Warmth to The Building’s Skin
– The World of Gio Ponti, Father of Modern Italian DesignInax Museums (Lixil Group), Tokoname, Japan
Until 18th March, 2014

A now-famous photograph of Gio Ponti’s super-light Superleggera chair, held up in the air with a single finger by a female model, appeared in a 1952 edition of Domus magazine. The chair itself (second exhibition picture, below) and the way it was presented can be seen as symbolic of Ponti’s pursuit of the light and the slim in his design and architecture.

Earlier in his career, from 1923 to 1930, Gio Ponti (1891-1979) had worked at ceramics company Manifattura Ceramica Richard Ginori, in Milan and Sesto Fiorentino, where his life-long obsession with the interior and exterior skin of buildings was kindled. Under his strong influence the entire output of the company would dramatically change.

In the show, many of Ponti’s sketches and architectural drawings appear alongside items of his furniture, and, so that visitors can better experience his architectural style – with the full support of the Gio Ponti Archives (Milan) – Inax have reproduced many actual tiles to Ponti’s authentic designs.

Exhibition curated by Kaoru TashiroDesign: Torafu ArchitectsSponsored by Lixil Corporation in special
cooperation with the Gio Ponti Archives

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Making its debut last week on a 6.4m / 21ft screen at Art Basel – Miami Beach, Terracotta Daughters, which traces the course of multi-disciplinary French artist Prune Nourry’s latest project, is a full-length feature documentary. The large-scale finished work itself, the Terracotta Daughter Army, presented for the first time at Magda Danysz Gallery in Shanghai in September, 2013, comprises 108 unique, life-size sculptures, produced in collaboration with local Chinese craftsmen, and is the artist’s reflection, through the appropriation of the unearthed Xi’an two-thousand-two-hundred-year-old Terracotta Warrior army, upon the issue of gender imbalance in China. It has been extended into the edition of eight prints shown above.

Prune Nourry, born in 1985, New York-based, where she is currently resident artist at the Invisible Dog Center, Brooklyn, presented her project Genesis – a demure pole dance, in which a model in skin-coloured leotard performs to a slow classical piece by Vivaldi – for the first time at the historic Casino Venier in conjunction with the 2013 Venice Biennale.

In 2010, as part of a 3-year project based around gender imbalance in India, drawing parallels between the cow – sacred animal and symbol of fertility – and her observance of the undervalued condition of India’s women, Nourry created life-like figurative sculptures, the Holy Daughters, that were part sacred cow, part girl, in resin, placing them in the streets of New Delhi before stepping back to film the reactions of local men. Bronze sculptures of the same design were included in exhibitions in 2011, in Berlin and Paris. She has taken part in many international group shows since 2004, as a performance artist as well as contributing installations, and had her first solo show in 2011.

After Shanghai, the Terracotta Daughter Army goes on a world tour, stopping first in Paris at the Centquatre Art Centre and Magda Danysz Gallery, and visiting Switzerland and the USA, before returning to China in 2015, where it is to be buried – the event no doubt, documented on film – until 2030.

Photos Anne-Gloria LefevreCourtesy Prune Nourry

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Edward Steichen in the 1920s and 1930s:
A Recent AcquisitionWitney Museum of American Art New York City, USA Exhibition: 6th December, 2013
– 23rd February, 2014

Two very different portraits (above) of the same woman, Marlène Dietrich – the first taken in 1931 by pioneering American photographer Edward Steichen (1879-1973) – the second about twenty-four years later, c 1955, by Anthony Armstrong Jones (later, Lord Snowdon) – feature in two very different events, the first starting at the end of this week, the other taking place at the beginning of next.

Steichen shot the beguiling and beautiful, young German-born actress/singer Dietrich, ten years into her career, exclusively for Vanity Fair magazine. It is one of approximately forty-five works, including celebrity portraits, of among others, Winston Churchill, Paul Robeson, Eugene O’Neill, and fashion photographs he created during his 1923 to 1937 stint as chief photographer for Condé Nast PublicationsVanity Fair and Vogue. Together with photographs he shot for advertising campaigns, and a selection of images that illustrate Steichen’s obsession with flowers, they comprise The Witney’s exhibition Edward Steichen in the 1920s and 1930s: A Recent Acquisition.

The Snowdon picture is one of eight portraits of Dietrich, each signed with a variety of sometimes cryptic dedications, for example: ‘Pour Maurice, de sa viel(le) ami(e) Marlène’ – scrawled over a picture of her in rather masculine attire – that over the course of both their careers, she presented to French entertainer Maurice Chevalier (1888-1972). And these are just a small sample of the 547 items, including many more signed and dedicated celebrity photographs – from the likes of Charlie Chaplin, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, to Brigitte Bardot, and Elvis Presley – as well as signed and collectible books, keepsakes, his signature hats and canes, furniture, wines, rugs, pianos, and even Chevalier’s 1967 Mercedes Benz 250 S, that will go under the hammer at one of Paris’s premier auction houses, in the Collection Maurice Chevalier sale at Hôtel Drouot, on Monday.

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